Subverting Scottish Male Identities in Gary: Tank Commander1 Mary Irwin, I
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‘Ah hink it's time for suttin blue n a BAILEYS!’ Subverting Scottish Male Identities in Gary: Tank Commander1 Mary Irwin, Independent Scholar and Gabrielle Smith, Northumbria University Introduction: Who is Gary? Actor and writer Greg McHugh’s popular Scottish comedy character Corporal Gary McLintoch, commander in the 104th Royal Tank Regiment, originated in McHugh’s stand-up performance of the character at the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe festival. In 2008, E4 commissioned a one-off pilot Gary’s War, starring the character, which subsequently won a Scottish BAFTA. In 2009, the BBC in Scotland produced the situation comedy Gary: Tank Commander based on McHugh’s character which chronicled the daily working lives and experiences (home and abroad) of Gary and the rest of the regiment. The live stage show Gary: Tank Commander - Mission Quite Possible (2016) was performed in Glasgow’s SSE Hydro concert venue. Indeed, Gary as a character has achieved significant cultural resonance for Scots. He was chosen to interrogate the leaders of the Scottish political parties on behalf of the nation ahead of the 2015 Holyrood election in a comedy special Gary: Tank Commander - Election Special (BBC 2016). As well as being a professional soldier who has successfully served tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gary loves to dance to Scandinavian bubblegum pop one-hit wonder ‘Barbie Girl’; he has 1980s pop duo sisters Mel and Kim’s smash hit ‘Respectable’ as his ringtone and is always partial to some cheesy pasta or a wee Baileys. McHugh’s playful, self- confident and exuberant creation works consistently to contradict, challenge and subvert established representations of Scottish men and masculinity that have previously and currently been offered in Scottish TV comedy. Theatricality, artifice and camp permeate the series, from McHugh’s central performance, to Gary’s extratextual, nonsensical interviews to camera, to the use of interstitial parodies of famous music videos by stars such as Beyoncé and Lady Gaga in which Gary leads his platoon. Situated within a critical framework that builds on Judith Butler’s scholarship on gender and performance, Susan Sontag’s work on camp and the concept of disidentification as explored by José Muñoz in his Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, this article considers McHugh’s performance of Gary’s masculinity focusing on why he is such a singular character within Scottish television comedy. Concurrently considering extant scholarship on Scottish moving image representations, the article interrogates hidden or frequently absent cultural discourses which Gary as a Scottish soldier and a Scottish man both challenges and embodies.2 Gary and Scottish TV Comedy To understand fully Gary’s significance and the knowing and multifaceted television performance of him that McHugh delivers, it is necessary first to locate Gary and McHugh within the broader context of the Scottish television situation comedy. This is notably a culture of urban working-class masculinity located in and around the city of Glasgow which is the setting for the most popular and influential series. One of the very few exceptions to this is BBC2’s send up of aircrew life, The High Life, which will be considered later in the article. The dominant character archetype for Scottish TV comedy is categorised from here on as The Glaswegian Man. To understand this tradition and its development, it is necessary first to consider the most successful and influential iterations of funny Scottishness and how Gary: Tank Commander engages with them. While it is neither the purpose of this article, nor within its scope, to offer any fully realised historical narratives of Scottish television comedy this article proposes critically and popularly acclaimed TV performances of Billy Connolly as one of the most important of these iterations and as a point of origin and influence for post-war representations and readings of the Scottish funny man, and this figure’s understood ethnicity as a broadly working-class man from Glasgow. Writing in Blain and Hutchison’s The Media in Scotland (2008), which considers Scotland on the small screen, Mowatt makes specific reference to discourses around Connolly as having ‘played a crucial part in other people’s perceptions of Scotland’ (137). Mowatt chronicles the tough, deprived background from which Connolly emerged. Born in the working- class Anderston district of Glasgow, Connolly was abandoned by his mother and molested and beaten by his father. He served a five-year apprenticeship as a welder in the upper Clyde shipyards, (Ibid). Connolly has subsequently achieved worldwide success and Mowatt describes him, along with Harry Lauder as ‘two of the best, internationally known comics of the 20th century’. (Ibid)3 Connolly’s act and persona evolved and broadened to be understood and enjoyed internationally, nevertheless it is as a distinctively Scottish outspoken alpha-male presence that he is best known. Connolly in full flow is simultaneously verbally dexterous, highly inventive, confident and so much in control of his audience and material that he can laugh at his own jokes while delivering them. At the same time there is no doubt of the toughness and intent of Connolly’s character. His richly creative stream of consciousness and impressive command of ideas, images and idioms is underpinned by the implicit hard man forged by the shipyards and the streets of impoverished early post-war Glasgow. The concept of the ‘hard man’ encapsulates an entrenched stereotype of working class Scottish masculinity built on physical strength and fearlessness frequently accompanied by a ferociously sarcastic sense of the absurd. Subsequently, a range of the most popular and successful Scottish TV comedies have built on the legacy of Connolly’s performance of the funny Glaswegian hard man developing and augmenting this archetype into the understood representation of what Scottish humour is. In The Glasgow Smile - An A-Z of the Funniest City on Earth Brown claims that ‘there is no Scottish comedy that is not Glaswegian, when people speak of the Scottish sense of humour what they mean is the Glaswegian sense of humour’ (Brown 2013: 2). Integral to this tradition and central to any narratives around Scottish TV comedy is the significance of The Comedy Unit in the creation, development, support and broadcast of Scottish TV comedy. Located in Glasgow The Comedy Unit was originally set up in 1993 as an in-house BBC department by Glaswegian TV producer and creative director Colin Gilbert, and has since then, been the production house for the hit comedies driven by a masculine Glaswegian culture and sensibility that have since come to represent Scottish comedy.4 What then are the comedies that have carried on this heritage telling stories from the perspective of the male working class Glaswegian? One of the most enduring comic creations which works with the TV comedy template created by Connolly is actor Gregor Fisher’s portrayal of Rab C. Nesbitt, self-appointed spokesperson for life in Glasgow’s impoverished Govan district in the eponymous series. (BBC 1988-2008). Irwin writes of Nesbitt that, ‘he offered a dark, nuanced reading of the bogeyman figure of the uncouth, workshy, untameable Glaswegian’ (2015: 94). Moreover, ‘Nesbitt, as street philosopher, revelled in his unconditional and unadulterated ‘two fingers up to the world’ stance, displaying at the same time a fierce reflective intelligence shot through with acute, mordant humour’ (Ibid). Nesbitt has much in common with the persona and the delivery which is associated with Connolly. Worthy of note is that the shipyards in which Connolly spent those highly significant early years were located in the self-same Govan, which is the setting for Nesbitt’s experiences. More recently one of the big BBC Scotland comedy TV successes is the long running and recently revived series Still Game (BBC Scotland, 2002-2016). Written and performed alongside an ensemble cast by Scottish actors and comedians Greg Hemphill and Ford Kiernan, Still Game also draws on Glaswegian working-class communities for inspiration, this time set on the post-war overspill new built estates and schemes that served to rehouse the inhabitants of Glasgow’s overcrowded and rundown inner city. In this instance, the protagonists of the comedy are pensioners making the best of their lot on the Craiglang housing estate. As with Nesbitt, protagonists Jack Jarvis (Kiernan) and Victor McDaid (Hemphill) are no-nonsense, working class Scotsmen whose constant aggrieved irritation about the travails of life in Craiglang is underpinned by a darkly incisive sense of humour. At the same time, as with Nesbitt and Connolly, there is also a vibrant verbal creativity to their humour and a keen observational eye continually at work. Still Game itself is based on a sketch in Hemphill and Kiernan’s equally popular earlier show Chewin’ the Fat (1999-2005). Chewin’ The Fat works with a robust line up of predominantly male Glaswegian characterisations. Once again the stand-out characters are most frequently robust, implicitly heterosexual, recognisably Glaswegian archetypes. These include ‘The Big Man’, a belligerent gangster and fixer whose response to sorting out clients’ problems is invariably brutal, retributive violence which he will administer; ‘Rab McGlinchy’, a hard faced, lager swilling tough who ‘interprets the evening news bulletins for the neds’: that is, translates the headlines into vernacular Glaswegian for the local thugs; and ‘the Dixons Boys’: motor- mouthed electronics shop assistants, a pair of badgering, cajoling up-sellers desperate to make sure no-one leaves the premises with only what they came in for. Another significant show that recycles these same archetypes is Burnistoun (BBC Scotland 2009-2012), a sketch show set in a fictional town on the outskirts of Glasgow, written and performed by Glaswegians Rab Florence and Iain Connell. The series builds on Chewin’ the Fat’s format of a sketch show based around local characters and the closely observed fictional Glaswegian community of Craiglang in Still Game.